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A rising industry

America has long remained one of the most wasteful countries in the world, generating 239 million metric tons of garbage every year, about 1,600 to 1,700 pounds per person. While some view it as a threat to our environment and society, the solid waste management industry sees an opportunity.

“It’s a profitable industry,” according to Debra Reinhart, a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the EPA. “It’s a difficult industry but it is profitable if it’s done right.”

Two private companies, Waste Management and Republic Services, lead the solid waste management sector. Together they own about 480 landfills out of the 2,627 landfills across the United States. The two companies have seen staggering performance in the market, with the stock prices of both doubling in the past five years. Both Waste Management and Republic Services declined CNBC’s request for an interview.

“They’ve learned how to be best-in-class businesses,” said Michael E. Hoffman, a managing director at Stifel Financial. “Their publicly traded stocks outperformed the market handily between 2015 and 2019 and underpinning it is a meaningful improvement in their free cash flow conversion.” The stocks have continued to outperform.

Tipping fees

Since its inception, landfills have made a majority of their revenue via tipping fees. These fees are charged to trucks that are dropping off their garbage based on their weight per ton.

In 2020, municipal solid waste landfills had an average tipping fee of $53.72 per ton. That translates to roughly $1.4 million a year in approximate average gross revenue for small landfills and $43.5 million a year for large landfills just from gate fees.

Tipping fees have seen steady growth over the past four decades. In 1982, the national average tipping fee sat at $8.07 per ton or about $23.00 when adjusted for inflation. That’s nearly a 133% increase in 35 years.

While tipping fees make landfills sound like a risk-free business, they are still quite an expensive investment. It can cost about $1.1 million to $1.7 million just to construct, operate and close a landfill. For this reason, private companies have replaced municipal governments to own and operate the majority of the landfills across the U.S.

“I think it’s because the trend has been to go larger and larger so the small neighborhood dump can’t exist because of the regulations and the sophistication of the design,” Reinhart said. “So we are tending to see large landfills, which do require a lot of investment upfront.”

Privatization of landfills

Private companies have also played an important role in discovering new ways beyond tipping fees to turn a profit out of garbage. Landfill mining and reclamation, a process of extracting and reprocessing materials from older landfills, is one of them.

In 2011, a private scrap metal company contracted with a nonprofit landfill in southern Maine to mine precious metals. In four years, they recovered more than 37,000 tons of metal worth $7.42 million.

But it isn’t always a success story. In 2017, the city of Denton, Texas, ended its landfill mining program before it could even start after realizing that the benefits weren’t worth its $4.56 million price tag. According to experts, economics is usually the biggest challenge to make landfill mining work.

“There’s virtually no way I can see how that makes money,” said Hoffman. “The commodity values would have to be at such higher levels than they are today for whatever it is you’re trying to get your hands on.”

Meanwhile, some experts argue that landfill mining can be profitable if done correctly by recovering more space for tipping fees.

“Many people are mining but they’re not reusing the space,” according to Sahadat Hossain, professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. “If you do the operation right, you’re never going to be involved and it will always make you money.”

Landfill gas to energy

Modern chemistry has also allowed landfills to be mined for energy, using methane gas that is produced from decaying trash. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, landfill gas generates about 10.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year. That’s enough to power roughly 810,000 homes and heat nearly 547,000 homes each year.

“The landfill gas operations that are known as low or medium DTU which are the predominant form of capturing the gas and turning it into electricity or steam and then selling it? Those are very good returns on capital projects,” Hoffman said.

While revenue from generating energy and fuel isn’t quite impressive, landfills that participate do benefit greatly from generous subsidies. The tipping fee, combined with various mining techniques and government subsidies have altogether transformed the landfill industry into a booming business.

The solid waste management industry will only continue to expand as long as there are those who view garbage as a resource rather than waste. Because when it comes to landfills, one man’s trash is quite literally another man’s treasure.

“Waste is not a waste, but it’s a resource,” emphasized Hossain. “World has limited resources. If we don’t reuse and recycle these, we cannot talk about a circular economy. That will always be a talk in the tabletop discussion.”

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Is Elon Musk delusional or lying about Tesla ‘Full Self-Driving’?

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Is Elon Musk delusional or lying about Tesla 'Full Self-Driving'?

Tesla CEO Elon Musk threw shade at Waymo for having “rookie numbers” amid Tesla’s own disappointing autonomous-driving performance, raising the question: Is Elon Musk delusional or simply lying about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving?

Every year since 2018, Musk has alternately claimed that Tesla would solve self-driving “by the end of the year” or “next year.”

It never happened.

Tesla claimed a sort of victory this year with the launch of its “Robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas, but even that has been misleading since the service only operates a few vehicles in a geofenced area, something Musk has criticized Waymo for in the past, and unlike Waymo, Tesla has in-car supervisors with a finger on a killswitch to stop the vehicle in case of a potential accident.

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Even with in-car supervisors preventing an unknown number of accidents, we recently learned that Tesla’s robotaxi crash rate is almost twice that of Waymo’s, which operates its service without any employees inside its vehicles.

Now, Musk called Waymo’s 2,500 fully autonomous vehicles currently in operation “rookie numbers”:

To put the comment in perspective, Tesla is believed to have about ~30 “Robotaxis” in its Austin fleet. In addition, Tesla claims to be operating “robotaxis” in the Bay Area with just over 100 cars, but it is officially considered a ride-hailing service because drivers are in the driver’s seat, and Tesla hasn’t even applied for an autonomous driving permit in California.

Tesla has also been pushing increasingly more misleading claims about its “Full Self-Driving” system being safer than humans.”

In the last few weeks, Tesla has repeatedly shared this misleading data as “proof” that its system is safer than humans:

This dataset is based on Tesla’s quarterly “Autopilot safety” report, which is known to be misleading.

There are three major problems with these reports:

  • Methodology is self‑reported. Tesla counts only crashes that trigger an airbag or restraint; minor bumps are excluded, and raw crash counts or VMT are not disclosed.
  • Road type bias. Autopilot is mainly used on limited‑access highways—already the safest roads—while the federal baseline blends all road classes. Meaning there are more crashes per mile on city streets than highways.
  • Driver mix & fleet age. Tesla drivers skew newer‑vehicle, higher‑income, and tech‑enthusiast; these demographics typically crash less.

With the new chart on the right above, Tesla appears to have separated Autopilot and FSD mileage, which gives us a little more data, but it still has all the same problems listed above, except the road-type bias is less pronounced, since FSD is also used on city streets.

However, many FSD drivers choose not to engage FSD in potentially dangerous or more difficult situations, especially in inclement weather, which contributes to many crashes – crashes that are counted in the human driver data Tesla is comparing itself against.

Lastly, it is unfair to say that the data proves FSD is safer than human drivers, as even with the flawed data, Tesla should claim that FSD with human supervision is safer than human drivers. It’s not FSD versus humans, it’s FSD plus humans versus humans.

It leads us to this.

With Tesla and Musk being undoubtedly wrong and misleading about the performance and the very nature of its current autonomous driving offering, I wanted to know your opinion about the situation through this poll:

Electrek’s Take

Personally, I think it’s a little of both.

I think he sometimes really believes Tesla is on the verge of solving autonomy, but at the same time, he is perfectly willing to cross the line and mislead people into thinking Tesla is further ahead than it actually is.

For example, I believe I can explain this comment about Waymo having “rookie numbers” despite the Alphabet company having about 10x more “robotaxis” than Tesla – even with Tesla’s very loose definition of a robotaxi.

Based on job listings across the US and his recent ridiculous comment that Tesla will magically cover half of the US population with robotaxis by the end of the year, I think Tesla is hiring thousands of drivers. Soon, it will put them in Model Ys with ‘Robotaxi’ stickers on them and have them drive on FSD and give rides in the Robotaxi app in several US cities.

Musk will claim that Tesla’s Robotaxi is now bigger than Waymo, even though it will basically be the equivalent of Uber drivers in Tesla cars with FSD, which is already the case. Just this week, I took an Uber from the Montreal airport, and it was in a Model Y with FSD. Has Tesla launched ‘Robotaxi’ in Montreal?

It’s either that or he counts consumer vehicles with FSD, which is even dumber.

In short, he is delusional, and when he realizes that he was wrong, he is willing to lie to cover things up.

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Solar and wind are covering all new power demand in 2025

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Solar and wind are covering all new power demand in 2025

Solar and wind are growing fast enough to meet all new electricity demand worldwide for the first three quarters of 2025, according to new data from energy think tank Ember. The group now expects fossil power to stay flat for the full year, marking the first time since the pandemic that fossil generation won’t increase.

Solar and wind aren’t just expanding; they’re outpacing global electricity demand itself. Solar generation jumped 498 TWh (+31%) compared to the same period last year, already topping all the solar power produced in 2024. Wind added another 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they supplied 635 TWh of new clean electricity, beating out the 603 TWh rise in global demand (+2.7%).

That lifted solar and wind to 17.6% of global electricity in the first three quarters of the year, up from 15.2% year-over-year. That brought the total share of renewables in global electricity – solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy, and geothermal – to 43%. Fossil fuels slid to 57.1%, down from 58.7%.

Renewables are beating coal

For the first time in 2025, renewables collectively generated more electricity than coal. And fossil generation as a whole has stalled. Fossil output slipped slightly by 0.1% (-17 TWh) through the end of Q3. Ember expects no fossil-fuel growth for the full year, driven by clean power growth outpacing demand.

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China and India are partly driving that shift. In China, fossil generation fell 52 TWh (-1.1%) as clean energy met all new demand, resulting from a structural change in its power system. India saw fossil generation drop 34 TWh (-3.3%), thanks to record solar and wind growth and milder weather.

Solar is leading the charge

Solar is doing the heavy lifting. It’s now the single biggest driver of change in the global power sector, with growth more than three times larger than any other electricity source in the first three quarters of the year.

“Record solar power growth and stagnating fossil fuels in 2025 show how clean power has become the driving force in the power sector,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior data analyst at Ember. “Historically a growth segment, fossil power now appears to be entering a period of stagnation and managed decline. China, the largest source of fossil growth, has turned a corner, signaling that reliance on fossil fuels to meet growing power demand is no longer required.”

Electricity demand rose 2.7% in the first three quarters of 2025, far slower than the 4.9% jump seen last year when extreme heatwaves pushed up cooling demand in China, India, and the US. This year’s milder weather helped take some pressure off the grid, making it easier for clean energy to close the gap.

A turning point for the global power system

For the first time outside of major crises such as the pandemic or the global financial crash, clean energy growth has not only kept up with demand but surpassed it. The next big question: can solar, wind, and the rest of the clean power sector keep up this pace consistently? If they can, 2025 may be remembered as the year global fossil generation plateaued.

Read more: FERC: For two years straight, solar leads new US power capacity


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The Genesis GV90 really does have coach doors [Video]

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The Genesis GV90 really does have coach doors [Video]

Genesis is taking luxury to the next level with its new flagship SUV. The GV90 is shaping up to be the brand’s most lavish vehicle yet, offering ultra-premium features like coach doors.

Genesis GV90 caught with coach doors in real life

After unveiling the Neolun Concept at the New York Auto Show last March, Genesis said it was a preview of its first full-size SUV.

The “ultra-luxe, state-of-the-art SUV,” as Genesis describes it, will be the brand’s largest and most luxurious vehicle yet, slotted above the GV80.

It wasn’t the stunning design or the over-the-top interior that caught most people’s attention, but the B-pillarless coach doors.

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Although we were worried that some of the ultra-premium features, like the coach doors, wouldn’t make it to the production model, new spy photos reveal otherwise.

A GV90 prototype was spotted out in public with the coach doors wide open, giving us our closest look at the setup. The new spy photos, courtesy of SH Proshots (via TheKoreanCarBlog), show the hinged door system in action and offer a glimpse of the interior.

Earlier this year, Hyundai Motor filed several patent applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, detailing new door latching devices.

Two patents, titled “Cinching Device For Door Latches in Vehicle” and “Door Latch Device for Vehicles,” offer a better idea of how the Genesis GV90’s coach doors will work.

Genesis has previously said that B-pillarless coach doors are now a reality in production vehicles. It looks like the GV90 will be the first to debut it.

Yes, the Genesis GV90 will be available with coach doors, but it likely won’t be standard on all trims. It could be a premium feature reserved for higher-priced variants. The GV90 has been spotted out in public several times now with a traditional door design. We’ve also caught a glimpse of other premium features it will offer, like adaptive air suspension.

Genesis-GV90-coach-doors
The Genesis Neolun electric SUV concept (Source: Genesis)

Genesis has yet to reveal prices or final specs. We could see the GV90 debut by the end of the year, with sales expected to start in mid-2026.

One thing is for sure: The Genesis GV90 won’t be cheap. It’s expected to start around $100,000, but higher trims could cost upwards of $120,000.

Genesis-GV90-coach-doors
Genesis Neolun electric SUV concept interior (Source: Hyundai Motor)

Earlier this week, a production version of the GV90 was caught for the first time driving in South Korea. It was still covered in camouflage, but from what’s shown, it looks nearly identical to the Neolun concept.

Reports suggest the flagship SUV could debut on Hyundai’s new eM platform. Hyundai claims the platform will deliver a 50% improvement in driving range per charge compared to its current EVs. It’s also expected to offer Level 3 autonomous driving and other advanced driver assist capabilities.

The flagship electric SUV will serve as a tech beacon, showcasing Hyundai’s latest tech and software. It’s expected to feature a massive 24″ curved infotainment as part of a digital cockpit design.

Genesis is also launching its first hybrid, the GV80, next year, and an extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) in late 2026 or early 2027. The luxury brand will also introduce a new off-road SUV as it expands into new segments.

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